The Calculated Populism of Rob Ford

Years before the political rise of Donald Trump, Rob Ford, who died on Tuesday, was mustering popular resentment against élites in Toronto.

Photograph by Steve Russell / Toronto Star / Getty

In 2012, a year and a half after Rob Ford became the mayor of Toronto, the city, which had grown by nearly forty thousand people in the previous year alone, passed Chicago to become North America’s fourth-largest municipality. For more than a decade, Toronto’s transformation from a provincial capital of low-slung brick buildings and expansive parks—the small town that Ernest Hemingway knew as a young reporter for the Toronto Star Weekly in the early nineteen-twenties—had been accelerating, turning it into one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.

But beneath that rapid growth, many members of the city’s electorate—especially in the suburbs, which had been amalgamated in 1998—were feeling the strain. Perceptions of a new divide between haves and have-nots emerged, exemplified by an epidemic of traffic-snarling condo construction and a growing class of young, affluent creatives. To those who weren’t benefitting from the boom, or who simply preferred Toronto as it had been, the city’s council and left-leaning mayor seemed élitist and out of touch, content to levy taxes from their perch downtown.

Out of this alchemy of expansion and resentment came Ford, who died on Tuesday of pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer, at the age of forty-six. In 2013, his fame, long established in Canada, spread to the United States after Gawker, followed closely by the Toronto Star, reported the existence of a video depicting the mayor smoking crack. For six months, Ford denied the allegation, before finally admitting to using the drug “in one of my drunken stupors.”

Given how sensational these events were, it was easy to forget (or, if you were new to Ford’s story, to miss) the lessons of his rise. Running for election in 2010, he had emerged as an improbable but genuine political phenomenon—one that in many ways anticipated a certain Republican politician with whom Americans have become intimately acquainted. Large, brash, and uncouth, Ford engaged in behavior and made utterances that would have sunk a traditional politician, but that appeared to enhance his standing with his core supporters, who called themselves Ford Nation.

I covered Ford’s campaign that year for Maclean’s magazine, beginning early on, when his bid still felt spurious and stunt-like. He was of second-generation wealth, a high-school football coach who had helped run his father’s successful label-making company. As a city councillor for ten years, he had developed a reputation as a loudmouth. And he was running for mayor against a candidate who seemed like a sure thing—George Smitherman, Ontario’s former minister of health. No one expected much of Ford.

That he won the election was no accident, however. Though he played the buffoon, especially in his later American media appearances, Ford was at the outset a calculating political operator, who fronted a mayoral campaign that a rival official told me was the most sophisticated he’d ever seen in Toronto. The operation that I witnessed combined deep political know-how—careful polling, sophisticated robocalls, dogged debate coaching—with the recognition that the last thing many Toronto voters wanted was an actual politician. Ford and his team relentlessly co-opted the critiques of his political rivals, and even his own gaffes, in order to advance a perception of Ford as an outsider, unafflicted by conventional insider politics.

His campaign was remarkably adept at turning what would have been liabilities for a traditional politician into assets. Ford’s checkered past was well documented in Toronto. In 1999, he had been convicted, in Florida, of driving drunk, and as a city councillor he was notorious for his homophobic and racist remarks. “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you wouldn’t get AIDS, probably,” he said in 2006. Two years later, he said, “Those Oriental people work like dogs. . . . They sleep beside their machines. . . . They’re slowly taking over.” When I asked him, for Maclean’s, about the drunk-driving conviction, he contended that it gave him something in common with many voters. “We all make mistakes,” he said. “A lot of people drink and drive. I got caught.”

On another occasion, his organizers invited a photojournalist and me to a campaign event at an uptown Toronto Chinese buffet, where we documented Ford, who sometimes described himself as “three hundred pounds of fun,” loading his plate with roast beef and mashed potatoes. When I asked one of Ford’s handlers, Nick Kouvalis, why he was content to have Ford chronicled as he ate, where another candidate might have found it unflattering, he gestured at the crowd. “Look at his supporters. They’re all overweight,” he said. This method of creating identification worked; as one voter told me, “When you insult him, you insult us.”

The men and women who ran Ford’s campaign were themselves outsiders, people from Winnipeg or Windsor, who shared his disdain for establishment politics. Kouvalis focus-grouped the candidate’s language, crafting slogans that captured some Torontonians’ appetite for brash, no-frills governance. Ford would “stop the gravy train” and “respect the taxpayer” by lowering taxes and putting the city’s allegedly coddled unions in their place (which is to say he was going to get Torontonians a lot of really great deals).

Ford was articulating the grievances of a forgotten, largely suburban constituency, but his strategy also resonated with others, and on election day voters in some of the city’s most progressive neighborhoods cast ballots for him. He got nearly half of the popular vote, in what was by then a three-person race, and won by almost twelve percentage points.

His time in office was, as most of the world now knows, a cautionary tale about what can happen when a populist candidate takes power. But in his first year as mayor he had some legislative successes. With the city council’s approval, he jettisoned an unpopular car tax, stripped transit workers of their right to strike, and outsourced a massive chunk of Toronto’s garbage collection.

His governing style relied heavily on bullying. One centrist councillor told me that he felt as though he had been “shoved into some weird underworld movie.” When the council began to push back, Ford’s failures mounted, and he would disappear at times, refusing to keep his office apprised of his whereabouts. Reports of boorish, drunken behavior began to proliferate. But when the crack-video allegation came to light, in 2013, even that seemed, in a way, to play to his narrative. Ford’s vices had put him in contact with some of Toronto’s outcasts and outlaws, and he’d indulged them in a part of the city where few politicians ever went. Infamously, he was photographed in a hoodie, arm in arm with three young men linked to the drug trade, including one who was shot and killed that same year. The men were standing outside the home where the smartphone footage of Ford smoking crack had purportedly been shot, in the city’s tough northwest, not far from some low-income housing complexes.

After Ford’s admission that he’d smoked crack, the council stripped him of most of his mayoral powers, but he never lost the support of his base. Emerging from rehab, in 2014, he again framed his battle as an everyman’s struggle, and announced that still intended to run for reëlection. But six weeks before election day he dropped out of the race, diagnosed with the cancer that later killed him. His brother Doug ran in his stead, finishing second to John Tory, a lawyer and businessman who has some of Toronto’s bluest blood. The lesson, for observers of popular movements, might have been that the establishment has a way of winning in the end.